Senator Cruz: ‘Stand and fight’

The Republican Study Committee hosted a bicameral panel today to discuss “the Obama Administration’s abuses of power and its refusal to enforce current laws on the books.” Senator Ted Cruz showed up at the last minute in cowboy boots to put an exclamation point on the whole thing.

“The fight we are engaged in in the next 60 days is the most important fight of this Congress,” he said, referring to fight to defund Obamacare. Cruz said the “single best opportunity to defeat Obamacare” will fall on the shoulders of the House.

“The way that makes sense to proceed is [to] begin in the House with y’all passing a continuing resolution that…prohibits both discretionary and mandatory funding to Obamacare,” he said. “President Obama and Harry Reid will scream and yell that [mean] Republicans want to shut down the government. Stand up and fight.”

Cruz stressed the urgency of preventing people from becoming “hooked on the sugar and hooked on the subsidies” of Obamacare before they become a “permanent feature of our economy going forward.”“If we don’t stand and fight now, we never will,” he said. “If we don’t stand and defund Obamacare today, we are saying we surrender.”

“What is the alternative to the continuing resolution?” Cruz asked. He said other attempts to defund Obamacare are “symbolic statements” that won’t become law under Harry Reid.

Cruz finished by saying the “fight is going to prove a very different kind of fight” in that it will not come from politicians in Washington, but from the American people who oppose Obamacare and who have signed and will sign the petition at dontfundit.com.

Obamacare was the topic of focus during the panel, but Congressman Darrell Issa was on hand to speak of the numerous other scandals which he, as chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been aggressively pursuing. Issa said the basis for President Obama referring to the Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and IRS scandals as “phony” comes from the fact that the fault comes to fall on the president’s political appointees.

Issa clarified that the “vast majority” of these scandals are revealed through investigation by the inspector general’s office. He said the job of the Oversight Committee is to “follow the facts…[to]uncover waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“If the president hides those facts, we will find them, and we will report them,” Issa said.

Senator Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, proposed legislation that his staff is working on to grant American citizens the ability to file a lawsuit against the federal government to fight infringement on their First Amendment rights. He said such a bill would “hold people accountable” and enable release of documents “we ought to be getting.”